We have just been through "President's Day". To understand the title of this short piece, I refer you to Albert Einstein's definition of war as an act of murder. Who am I to argue with that genius? Every President except two who died early in office have thus been surrogate murderers.
How many have all 46 minus 2 presidents murdered? It would be easier to crack Ft. Knox to get an official answer to my question. It doesn't really matter though. I will have one of my heroes give you his estimate of the number of people our presidents and "we" (as US citizens represented by our government) murdered just in the Vietnam War along with the accompanying devastation. His name is S.B. Wilson. Mr. Wilson, now a lawyer, lost both legs crushed by an oncoming munitions train he had attempted to halt. He has tallied for us the deaths and destruction from one war alone, the US war waged against the Southeast Asian people in Viet Nam, Laos, and Cambodia that is known as the Viet Nam War. Read his account and try not to weep:
-Over 6 million Southeast Asians killed.
-Over 64,000 US and Allied soldiers killed.
-Over 1,600 US soldiers, and 300,000 Vietnamese soldiers remain missing.
-Thousands of amputees, paraplegics, blind, deaf, and other maimings created.
-13,000 of 21,000 of Vietnamese villages, or 62 percent, severely damaged or destroyed, mostly by bombing.
-Nearly 950 churches and pagodas destroyed by bombing.
-350 hospitals and 1,500 maternity wards destroyed by bombing.
-Nearly 3,000 high schools and universities destroyed by bombing.
-Over 15,000 bridges destroyed by bombing.
-10 million cubic meters of dikes destroyed by bombing.
-Over 3,700 US fixed-wing aircraft lost.
-36,125,000 US helicopter sorties during the war; over 10,000 helicopters lost or severely damaged.
-26 million bomb craters created the majority from B-52s (a B-52 bomb crater could be 20 feet deep, and 40 feet across).
-39 million acres of land in Indochina (or 91 percent of the land area of South Viet Nam) littered with fragments of bombs and shells, equivalent to 244,000 (160 acre) farms, or an area the size of all New England except Connecticut.
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